Source Code Repository

Our developers are located all around the world. To enable them to work
together on our software, we keep the source code in an Internet-accessible
revision control system called Subversion
(SVN). Apache committers have write access to the Subversion repository,
enabling them to make changes to the source code. Everyone has read access
to the repositories, so you may download the most up-to-date development
version of the software.
If you are looking for a stable release of the source code, you should
download it from the distribution
directory. The Subversion
repository should only be used if you want to be on the bleeding-edge of
the development effort. The code contained in them may fail to work, or it
may even eat your hard drive.
There are several ways to access the Subversion repository:

Configuring the Subversion client

Committers will need to properly configure their svn client. One particular
issue is OS-specific line-endings for text files. When you add a new text
file, especially when applying patches from Bugzilla, first ensure that the
line-endings are appropriate for your system, then do...
svn add test.txt
svn propset svn:eol-style native test.txt
Your svn client can be configured to do that automatically for some common
file types. Add the contents of the file
http://www.apache.org/dev/svn-eol-style.txt to the bottom of your
~/.subversion/config file.[Note: for Windows this is normally
found at C:\Documents and Settings\{username}\Application
Data\Subversion\config -or-For Windows 7 at
C:\Users\{username}\AppData\Roaming\Subversion\config]

Some files may need additional properties to be set, for example
svn:executable=* should be applied to those script files
(e.g..bat,.cgi,.cmd,.sh) that are intended to be executed. Since not all
such files are necessarily intended to be executed, the executable property
should not be made an automatic default.

However, you should still pay attention to the messages from your svn
client when you do 'svn commit'.

Tip: If you use TortiseSVN, a popular Windows GUI client that integrates
with Windows Explorer, you can simply right click in Explorer and select
TortiseSVN - Settings, and then press the "Edit" button to
update your "Subversion configuration file:". Simply copy the
above svn-eol-style.txt file's contents into the end of the
config editor (usually Notepad) that appears, and save the file.

SSL Server certificate

The server certificate for
https://svn.apache.org/ is a real SSL
certificate. However, Subversion, by default, does not currently ship with
a list of trusted CAs. So, here's some information to help you verify the
validity of our cert:

Note: SSL fingerprints (as above) for the SVN hosts are listed in the Machines List

On some platforms, the root Thawte certificate, used to sign the Apache
SSL cert, is not made available to OpenSSL and Subversion. Fix this by
downloading the Thawte root certificate, and updating your Subversion
servers file accordingly to use it for SSL validation:

Save the Thawte root certificate (in .pem format) to a suitable path,
for example, in your ~/.subversion/ directory, or on Windows, in
%USERPROFILE%\AppData\Roaming\Subversion\ folder.

In the servers file, found in the same folder, add the following to
the [global] section, adding the section if required, and
amending the path appropriately:

Re-trying the Subversion operation should now succeed. In some cases,
you may additionally need to move to a more recent svn client, version,
1.6 or higher should be sufficient.

"svn: No such revision 765287" errors

If you're getting an error message like the following:

svn: No such revision 765287

This may be because of a short lag in the synchronization between
Subversion mirrors, and can occur if multiple commits are run immediately
after each other. This error will usually only happen if you are located in
Europe, or explicitly using the European mirror.

Waiting for 10 seconds and repeating the command should succeed.

"specified baseline is not the latest baseline" errors

If you're getting an error message like the following:

svn: Commit failed (details follow):
svn: The specified baseline is not the latest baseline, so it may not be
checked out.

This may be because of a short lag in the synchronization between
Subversion mirrors, and can occur if multiple commits are run immediately
after each other. This error will usually only happen if you are located in
Europe, or explicitly using the European mirror.

Waiting for 10 seconds and repeating the command should succeed.

"Compressed stream invalid" errors

That's a known issue in the neon client library which has been fixed in
neon 0.24.7. A workaround is to disable compression in your client. Edit
~/.subversion/servers. Uncomment the [global] section if neccessary, and
add a line that reads

http-compression = no

And that should "fix" the problem until you can upgrade.

Problems using date revisions

If you are using a date revision such as -r{2004-09-12}:{2004-08-12} and
not getting any or all of the revisions you expected, this is a known
problem specific to the ASF repository.

Unfortunately, there is nothing that can be done to improve this situation,
so you must use a workaround. You can use svn log or ViewVC to locate the
actual revision number that is first after the date you desire, and
substitute that into your -r argument to the svn command.

The particular reason this occurs is because the order of the revisions is
not identical to the order of dates in the repository. This is a side
effect of loading CVS repositories with history with dates prior to the
latest date in the Subversion repository.

Frequently Asked Questions

When Do I Need To Use svn lock?

Very rarely. Commits in subversion are
transactional. This means that locks are almost always unnecessary.

An oft quoted use case is to prevent concurrent editing of a large
unmergeable binary document. However, for open development, good
communication is preferable to locking even in this use case. A good timely
post to the list letting your fellow developers know that you're going to
start editing that huge PDF is better than locking the file.

How frequently can I run a cron that connects to the repository?

Hourly is fine. Please do not use programs that poll the repository more
frequently than hourly. People who run automated scripts that continuously
poll the repository wind up getting their access denied, which may impact
other folks connecting through the same host. If you need to stay more
in-sync than an hourly cron allows, subscribe your script to the relevant
commit mailing list.

How do I mirror the entire SVN repository for my experimental $foo?

First, ask yourself: do I really want the entire ASF repository? Generally
most people really want only a single project. In that case, just checkout that
source directory from the repo.